


the war of 20-year-olds

by hachimitsuto, kagamiwa, Naladot, yoonbot (iverins)



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, battle of the bands au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-23 22:48:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8345785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsuto/pseuds/hachimitsuto, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kagamiwa/pseuds/kagamiwa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/Naladot, https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: When you’re in university, there are things that are bound to happen.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Война двадцатилетних](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12921822) by [Antanya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antanya/pseuds/Antanya), [lieutenant_cloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_cloud/pseuds/lieutenant_cloud)



When you’re in university, there are things that are bound to happen. Some may just be fleeting, like being obsessed with a certain meal at the cafeteria for a whole semester then forgetting all about it when the next semester starts. Some stay in your mind for a period of time, like the person you’ve had your eyes on before you learn that that person already has someone else. Some things are more impactful, long lasting, or may even be life changing.

Four boys enroll into the same university, are assigned to the same rooms, and share one other thing in common. Of course something is bound to happen.

Kang “you can call me Brian” Younghyun touches down in Incheon International Airport about 18 hours after his roommate Park “it’s Jae” Jaehyung does, bass strapped to his back and all ready to take the business management world by storm. Second-year transfer student Jae arrives with his electric guitar and a head full of doubts and worries and accidentally walks in on Im Junhyeok trying very desperately to place some books on the top shelf of his bookshelf. Junhyeok, Seoul native, philosophy major and classical pianist turned contemporary music enthusiast shares the room with Park Sungjin, currently stuck on a delayed train from Busan and running late for registration. Self-taught guitarist Sungjin’s acoustic guitar bumps along in the seat beside him and every now and then he pats it as if to reassure himself about something.

It is Junhyeok who first suggests the _hey-we-should-totally-start-a-band_ idea to Jae, and then on Jae’s recommendation suggests it to Brian, and then after gathering them in his room suggests it to a very surprised Sungjin. They jam together and record some videos but they all agree that there is something fundamentally missing from their music. A year later he waltzes into their practice room with synth magician Wonpil in tow, who turns out to be his childhood best friend.

Boom. Band complete.

They’re set now. Only good things are bound to happen. A bright future awaits them. Maybe even a record deal. “Maybe we can go on a tour with Taylor Swift as the opening act. You know, like The Jonas Brothers,” Jae muses. Sungjin laughs, tells him not to expect too much, hopes to make it big anyway. Junhyeok lists out places they can go to when they have their own tour, while Brian lists out what’s good to eat there. Wonpil watches them all in admiration, smiling as though he’s glad to be a part of the next big thing.

They fail a few times but they’re still set. They have a hard time scoring gigs but good things are still bound to happen. They haven’t made it big after another year but a bright future still awaits them. At least, until the message pops up in their Kakaotalk group chat.

_I’m quitting._

Boom. Junhyeok leaves the band.

Now what do you do?

 

 

 

 

 

**Sungjin**

The sight of Junhyeok and Jae laughing too outrageously loud, faces much too close for comfort is what greets him when he wakes up. Not too far from them, he spots Brian perched on the edge of his single bed that is already small enough for him, and definitely too cramped for the four of them altogether.

“What are you guys doing?” he questions, feeling more confused than angry.

“Told you he wouldn’t say fuck! This is Sungjin, man. Sungjin doesn’t say the word,” Jae exclaims happily, pointing a finger at Junhyeok before changing the gesture to an open palm. “My 10000 won please, my friend.”

“This is not over yet! He hasn’t seen his face,” the latter defies. It’s only now that Sungjin notices the questionable neon pink marker pen in Junhyeok’s hand. He doesn’t miss the words ‘GLOW IN THE DARK’ either. Knowing that shouldn’t mean good, Sungjin chooses not to bring it up.

“That’s not fair! We didn’t say anything about this!” Jae argues back, sounding a lot too defensive for what Sungjin understands is a 10000 won bet.

Junhyeok crosses his arms. “Well then, let’s ask our honorary judge for his opinion. What is your say about this situation, Mr Kang Younghyun?”

All three of them including Sungjin himself turn to look at Brian at once. Brian is half wincing, because no one ever calls him by his real name even though he’s not in Toronto anymore, and half laughing at everything else. He collects himself quickly, sits straighter and tries to look more dignified. “I say,” he begins in voice a lot deeper than normal. “We let Sungjin see his face first.”

“What the hell?” Jae rebukes instantly. “Brian, I thought we’re friends! Are we not friends? What am I to you if I’m not a friend? I think of you as my bro, man,” he rambles on, switching to English halfway, still the language he’s more comfortable speaking.

“Now let’s not be dramatic,” Junhyeok snickers as he takes his phone out of his pocket and turns the camera on. Already on selfie mode, Sungjin notes. Junhyeok doesn’t forget to check himself out in the mirror first before shoving it to Sungjin’s face, but the latter swats his hand away easily without even glancing. Save the horror for later. Sometimes, ignorance _is_ bliss.

Feeling confused still and the most betrayed in this entire situation, Sungjin begins his outburst. “Will someone please explain what you guys are doing here? Or at least tell me how on earth did you manage to get inside? Am I not in Jaebum’s room?” he asks. Jaebum has an accidental privilege of having the room for himself because his last roommate dropped out and the university never placed another person to fill in. Sometimes Sungjin comes here to sleep, especially because Junhyeok likes to stay up watching his favourite animes while making dramatic commentaries.

“First of all, chill. We’re not bad people,” Jae tries. Try is the keyword, without any other complementary or accompanying verb. Jae simply tries. Meanwhile, Brian is laughing again. “We come in peace, man. Junhyeok said you didn’t come back last night so we knew we’d find you here, and we bribed our way in with two packs of ramyun. Jaebum let us in before he went out earlier.”

“Jaebum sold me for two packs of ramyun?” Sungjin has never felt more betrayed. The last time he felt this betrayed was when his mother told every ahjumma in their neighbourhood that he wet his bed while dreaming about swimming in a pool of banana milk. He was six.

“Also Sunmi noona’s phone number,” Junhyeok adds, then glances at Brian. “Wait, how the hell did you get her number?”

Brian, who is now munching on a bag of chips he found on the floor, which Sungjin is sure belongs to Jaebum, shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly. “Dunno. It’s just there.”

All three of them, Sungjin included, can only gape at Brian because _no one just happens to have Sunmi’s number_. Do things like this actually happen or do they only happen to people like Brian? Sungjin ponders this over in his head for a while, then realizes that he has better things to do. Like getting these boys out of his room, or at least off his bed.

“No offense but can you guys leave?” he asks extra nicely.

Jae places a hand over his chest and makes a face that makes him look more like he needs a toilet badly than hurt. “That’s full offense, dude.”

“Yeah we came here all excited because we, or more accurately _I_ actually saved our career,” Junhyeok quips.

“What did you do?”

“Junhyeok found a new place for us to practice in,” Brian casually explains, still munching on the chips and appearing like he has zero intention to share.

The former nods, looking extremely pleased of himself. “Right, which means now we can leave that creepy abandoned brothel you found and write better, more inspiring lyrics.”

“What inspiring lyrics? We’re a rock band, not a Disney produced boyband,” Jae intrudes.

“Whatever. The point is we don’t have to practice in that creepy abandoned brothel anymore.”

“It’s not an abandoned brothel! The landlord told me it used to be a study room,” Sungjin retorts back.

“Whatever. It still looks like an abandoned brothel to me.”

“Don’t just whatever everyone-”

“So anyway,” Junhyeok continues while ignoring his attempt to defend himself. “We all came here to take you there.”

Sungjin’s eyes widen a little. “What, I’m the only one who hasn’t seen the place?”

“No, Brian hasn’t seen it either.” Junhyeok points at the said person, who raises a hand readily and brightly like a student whose name is called during the roll call. “But you’re about to be the last one if you don’t hurry up and wash.”

With so much unnecessary fuss, the boys (sans Brian who instead looks for more food) drag Sungjin out to the bathroom at the end of the hallway, and the latter uses up all of his strength for the day to get Jae not to strip him out of all his clothes, and out of the stall. When he’s finally ready, Jaebum’s room is suddenly empty with none of the boys in sight, but there’s a loud noise of car honks coming from his windows, along with obnoxious screams of his name. Heaving a deep sigh, he immediately sprints out for fear that he might get kicked out for disturbance he didn’t even cause.

Brian awaits him at the driver’s seat with a new bag of chips in his left hand, while both Junhyeok and Jae, the culprits behind all the noise, are now sitting solemnly at the backseat, like they never did anything. Sungjin snatches the chips from Brian’s hand as soon as he’s settled in, and the latter gives him a nice pat on the shoulder before he turns the ignition on.

The place Junhyeok found, their new practice room, turns out to be not so bad after all. It’s the basement of what used to be a church, so the place is spacious enough to accommodate them and their noise, and even comes with an old wooden piano, hidden beneath a white cloth. Everything is covered in dust. The door creaks at the slightest movement. There are only two small windows to allow the sun and fresh oxygen in.

Sungjin takes a step forward, and takes every detail in. “So?” he hears Junhyeok ask. “What do you think?”

A smile. This, he thinks, is a perfect place for a fresh start.

 

 

 

That was two years ago.

Now, Sungjin sits alone staring at the screen of his phone. He’s at the library when the text message arrives, has been there for the entire day because there’s an exam soon that he doesn’t want to bomb. The text message is short and brief. It makes him wonder if it wasn’t a hard decision for Junhyeok. Is it easy leaving them behind?

When he returns to their room, Junhyeok’s stuff is already gone. The closet has been emptied, the desk is clear, and the bed is vacant. Even his The Beatles poster taped behind the door is gone. There isn’t a single trace of Junhyeok left, like he’s never been in the room at all.

Sungjin never replied to the text message. None of the other boys did. Jae tells him later that Junhyeok doesn’t answer any of their calls anyways. Brian is pissed off. It’s apparent when they try to practice without Junhyeok later and keep making mistakes, especially Wonpil who is taking over the keyboard on Sungjin’s suggestion. Wonpil’s eyes are hollow as he tries to smile at him, trying to make him feel better. But he doesn’t feel better. It’s not a situation where he can feel better.

He meets up with Jaebum a couple of days later. Jaebum is not in the band, not even friends with the rest of the boys besides Wonpil and Brian, but Jaebum is always glad for Sungjin when he tells him about the progress they’re making as a band, no matter how slow it is. Jaebum asks Sungjin to meet at some cafe outside the campus because he’s not around, and when he arrives looking sharp in a suit, Sungjin realizes that people his age are supposed to be more like Jaebum, out there looking for jobs and being worried about not having enough specs for the job they want, while he’s here with an uncertain future, stuck in a limbo.

The first thing that Jaebum asks after Sungjin told him what happened is what he is going to do now. Honestly, Sungjin doesn’t know either. He figured perhaps Jaebum could tell him, or at least make some suggestions because after all Jaebum did help him when he used to have a crush on the cafeteria lady’s daughter who also attends the same university albeit different course in their second year. It wasn’t a success, but without Jaebum he probably would still be pining over the girl now.

“What are you going to do now?”

A similar question is asked by Wonpil who waits for him when he goes back to his room. Wonpil is sitting at what used to be Junhyeok’s chair staring out the window. Sungjin almost thought Junhyeok was back, until Wonpil turns around and greets him with a careful smile. “Sorry. The door was unlocked, so I just came in,” he says.

“That’s alright,” Sungjin manages. He chooses to seat himself at his own bed, keeping a safe distance for a reason he himself doesn’t know of. It hasn’t been that long since he last saw Wonpil, but the boy sitting across the room looks a lot thinner compared to then, older and tired. His cheek bones are more apparent, and there are dark circles around his eyes now.

Wonpil presses his lips together, places a hand on the desk and glances at the empty bed. “I guess Junhyeok is not coming back.”

Sungjin shakes his head. “I guess not.”

“What happens now?”

“I wish I have an answer for you, Pil-ah. For all of us.”

The two of them fall silent. Wonpil goes back to staring out the window, who knows what goes through his mind. What would a normal second year be thinking, worrying about, if not about their collapsing band? Sungjin lies back in his bed, a hand behind his head as he stares at the whirring ceiling fan, and without realizing, he falls asleep.

He only wakes up when his phone vibrates in his pocket. It’s already dark out. Wonpil is gone, and he’s left alone in the room again. Sungjin fishes his phone out, takes a look at the screen and sees the name he’s missed. _Mom_. Park Sungjin, a Busan man at heart, who didn’t even shed a tear when he got his heart broken, cries.

 

 

 

The only times Sungjin ever went home were for Chuseok. His parents were happy to have him back the first time, having gone several months without seeing and barely hearing from each other. After that, he started to spend more time with the band and less time on study, which also means his grades were dropping and his parents, especially his father, weren’t pleased to know.

Going back to Busan now with a future bleaker than ever before is not something that he ever planned. No one wants to see their parents and tell them about their band falling apart. But if he doesn’t go back to Busan now and instead continues sitting in his room wallowing in self-pity any longer than this, he thinks he might just lose it.

He calls Brian while waiting for his train. Brian has been angrier about this situation compared to anyone else. Said it’s all Junhyeok’s fault for putting everyone in this mess. Somehow, strangely, Sungjin feels like as the one who provides the band songs, Brian is actually blaming himself. Despite what he said, Brian is probably angrier at himself.

“Are you leaving now?” Brian asks. His voice is quiet, soft, maybe sad.

“Yeah.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

Sighing, Sungjin glances at the people around him. There are more people here than he thought. Amongst this many people, here he is, beaten and worn out. Just three years ago, he stepped his foot for the first time here, feeling all optimistic and looking forward to start a new life in the city. Has that feeling faded over time?

Right then, he hears the announcement about his train’s arrival. “I’ve got to go, Younghyun,” he says quietly. The terminal trembles with the weight of an incoming train, most probably the one that will take him home. At the same time, his chest trembles with the weight of an unfulfilled dream.

 

 

 

“So is the band over?”

Sungjin’s having his third shot of soju when Seungyoon poses the question. His head is buzzing a little. It’s been a while since he last had alcohol in his system. He frowns at his friend. “How come everyone I meet asks me the same question?”

The latter laughs. “It’s something you can’t help wondering,” he replies with a shrug, then reaches for another meat. “Who’s everyone?”

“Well, Younghyun did, before that it was Jaebum, Wonpil then my mom, my sister…” he trails off. “Almost everyone.”

Seungyoon laughs again, pours another cup for Sungjin and himself, and flashes a smile as they clink their cups together before downing another shot. Sungjin has known him since they were in elementary school and pretty much grew up together. If anything, Seungyoon is the friend he trusts the most.

“Why must that hold you guys back though? I mean, yeah, it sucks to have your bandmate leaving, especially since he just disappeared like that without giving any solid reason. Everyone needs some kind of closure, but still, what’s holding you back? There are lots of bands out there that are doing fine without a keyboardist. Of course you need to rearrange your songs now, but I think you guys should be fine. Or you can always look for a new keyboardist?”

Sungjin shifts uncomfortably in his seat and turns the cup around in his hand mindlessly. His friend is right, but also wrong. Rearranging their songs would not be that hard. It’s Brian who wrote most of them anyway. Finding a new keyboardist would be easy either. There must be other keyboardists out there dying to be in a band. What’s holding them back is that the fact they are even a band now is all thanks to Junhyeok. The idea of going on without him just doesn’t sit right with him.

“Everything,” he mumbles weakly. “Everything’s holding us back.”

This time, it’s Seungyoon who sighs. “I don’t blame you for feeling that way. But think about it. He did throw you guys away, didn’t he?”

 

 

 

Sungjin spends his time in Busan alternating between wallowing in self-pity and self-hatred. One moment, he’d be contemplating his choices in life while letting the freezing Haeundae breeze pierce through his lungs. The next moment, he’d be at some truck bar by the street pouring shots after shots with Seungyoon while rambling about the things he could done better, because if he was better at his singing, if he could score them better gigs, if he helped lead the band more, maybe Junhyeok wouldn’t have left.

They reach a point when Seungyoon can’t tolerate his mood swings any longer, so one night his friend drags him to a performance by a local band. Sungjin can’t stand being there at first, but the more he watches the band up there on the stage, belting out their songs with all they’ve got just like what his band used to do, grinning and even sending secret signals to one another in between that sometimes made them crack up in the middle of performing, the more his heart aches. He longs to be there.

He hasn’t called Brian in a while, or any of the boys for that matter. There hadn’t been any texts either, except a short one from Jae saying that he and Brian are off looking for Junhyeok. All of a sudden, he misses all of them.

“You can’t give up that easily,” Seungyoon says quietly. His voice almost gets drowned by the music and the crown, but Sungjin hears his friend perfectly clear. Their eyes meet, and then he feels his phone vibrate with a new incoming message. From Wonpil.

_Come back soon, hyung._

 

 

 

In his dream, he is transported back to his room, when he woke up to the sight of his bandmates, his friends, all looking at him and laughing at something. This time, Wonpil was around, too. It’s all inaudible - their voices, the sounds of their laughter, even his guitar that Brian was holding, as though he was watching them from far, far away. Maybe he was.

Nevertheless, Sungjin smiled. _This_ , he thought, _just this_.

 

 

 

Sungjin takes the first train back to Seoul the next morning.

 

 

 

 

 

**Brian**

Brian rereads the message again to make sure he hasn’t misunderstood anything. He settles against his pillow, letting his hand fall limply to his side, and stares up at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the corner that has probably been there since the beginning of time, and a tiny spiderweb that has only been there since a month ago. Jae refused to let him sweep it away, saying something about “spider roommates” and how “the spider probably thinks we’re its bros.” Brian refrained from mentioning that the spider probably crawled over their faces at night and laid eggs in their eyebrows, lest he put out Jae’s burgeoning spider bromance and _really_ , he should have seen this coming.

He’s glad that Jae isn’t in the room as he calmly turns off his phone, picks up his empty mug from where it sits beside him on his bedside table, and hurls it against the wall.

 

 

 

Brian spends the first two days after Junhyeok’s departure nursing a broken heart. More often than not he leaves the room when Jae even so much as blows air against the strings of his guitar. He tries to spend as much time as possible with people who weren’t associated with the band, which means a ridiculous amount of trips to the basketball court with Jaebum and countless hours spent at the arcade with Ayeon. Brian has always sucked at basketball and the tinny arcade music gives him a headache but he goes so that he won’t tear up in the middle of trying to calculate revenues and profits because after 3 years of majoring in business he _still_ can’t even get basic accounting right and he’s a failure and he’ll never make it big and _it’s all your fault Junhyeok left, Brian, it’s all your fault_.

He calls a meeting once because dammit they still have a competition to think about even if Junhyeok is gone but Sungjin and Jae don’t turn up and Wonpil almost makes him burst into tears that he decides that he won’t call the next one until he’s ready. If he’ll ever be ready.

 

 

 

Brian spends the next three days after Junhyeok’s departure filled with rage. He snaps at Sungjin when he asks him how he’s doing. He ignores Wonpil’s concerned texts. He ignores Jae, period. He’s mad about, well, _everything_ but most of all he’s mad that he even let himself be dragged in by the charming smirk on Junhyeok’s face when he said _I see you play bass. Have you ever thought about joining a band?_

“Look, if you don’t want to play you can just say so, okay?” Sunmi yells at him when he destroys another shuttlecock in the span of 5 minutes. “Don’t take it out on my shuttlecocks.” Brian walks away, throwing his badminton racket back into the bag. “What the hell is your problem, Kang Younghyun?”

Im Junhyeok is his problem, he thinks. If he hadn’t been the one to suggest this whole band thing, if he hadn’t introduced Brian to Sungjin, if he hadn’t gotten Wonpil caught up in this whole fiasco…

If he hadn’t left.

At the end of the week Brian is convinced that this is all Im Junhyeok’s fault.

 

 

 

Resignation follows on the weekend, and with it a sense of defeat. They were never going to make it big anyway. They were just dumb kids following a distant star that turned out to be an airplane, and Brian is sure that the only star he was following was the infinite galaxy behind Sungjin’s eyes when he smiled. Because he hadn’t _really_ joined for the music, had he? Sure, he was pretty good at the bass but to think of making a career out of it? Would he even have thought of joining the band if Park Sungjin wasn’t a part of it? If he wasn’t a little in love with Junhyeok himself?

“Hey,” someone touches him on the shoulder in the library and he jumps, slamming his book shut on instinct. The sound causes several students to stare at him, and the librarian glares at him. He lifts a hand in apology and looks up at the offender. Sungjin smiles back. Brian sees nothing but a black hole behind his eyes. Is it his fault or Junhyeok’s now?

“Hey,” he mutters back, reopening his book and pretending to be looking for the chapter he was on. One week he hasn’t touched his bass. One week he hasn’t been able to hold a conversation with Sungjin about, well, anything. As if whatever connection they had as friends was simply a fragile suspension cable in the bridge linking him to Junhyeok and had burned up along with it.

‘’Jae says you won’t talk to him,” Sungjin takes the empty seat beside him. Brian has a sudden urge to flee. He keeps looking at his book. Then, “I’m sorry.”

It’s so unexpected that Brian turns to look at him. Sungjin looks so tortured, so broken, that it takes all he can to not fall to pieces in front of him too. “What?” he whispers instead.

“It’s my fault,” Sungjin mutters back, casting a wary glance back at the librarian. “If I had been more serious, if I hadn’t put my studies ahead of the band, maybe Junhyeok wouldn’t have done the same, maybe he –”

“What?” Brian hisses this time. “Are you kidding me? Junhyeok didn’t quit because of studies, do you think he cared much about that? The guy has never gone to a lecture, there’s no way in hell he would abandon us just for _school_.”

“Why else would he quit then?” In the past 2 years Brian has never seen this kind of weariness in Sungjin’s face before. Not during the hells of assignment week, not when they can’t seem to find that one chord that would tie the whole song together, not even when they tried to busk in Hongdae once and epicly failed. It pricks him under his skin, and he suddenly wants to hurl his book at Sungjin and tell him to stop, _stop_ because _none of this is your fault you couldn’t have stopped this if you tried Sungjin you try so hard for all of us already you try so hard -_

“Because he was a bastard,” Brian says out loud. “He was a selfish bastard who only started the band to help him get his big break. He didn’t give a damn about the rest of us. He used us for his own gain.” He’s acutely aware that he might as well be talking about himself.

Sungjin looks a little shocked, and Brian can’t blame him. He can’t ever remember a time when he actually shared his thoughts about people with the others and maybe that was a little malicious, but Junhyeok deserves it. If it hadn’t been for him… if it hadn’t been for all of them… Brian grits his teeth. He hasn’t been able to get a good grip on his thoughts since that damned text message.

“I don’t believe Junhyeok would do that to us,” Sungjin says finally. He puts his hands on his knees. “I’ve been his roommate for more than 2 years, I know him. He wouldn’t.”

“I was in his band for more than 2 years,” Brian turns back to his book. “I thought I knew him.”

Sungjin is silent for a few seconds, and then he pushes his chair away. “I’m going back to Busan,” he says, standing up. Brian looks up at him. “Tonight. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Brian tries to find some words to fill the silence between them but he comes up with nothing. At the last second he grabs Sungjin’s sleeve as he’s turning away. “Is that it then? Are we finished?” he cries out. In the distance the librarian half gets out of her seat, looking annoyed.

Sungjin’s eyes offer him nothing. “You know if I knew the answer to that I would tell you, Younghyun.” And he’s gone.

Brian doesn’t know what he knows anymore.

 

 

 

It was probably for the best that Junhyeok left anyway, Brian tells himself. He never seemed to like Brian’s songs as much as the others, and he always seemed to find some alternative to Brian’s piano arrangement. And Brian could appreciate that, could even let it go because talented piano players like Junhyeok always inspired something like awe inside him, but he hated the way Junhyeok always nodded to himself after hearing the words of encouragement from the others, like a smug little _hah_ directed specifically at Brian.

And Brian hated how Junhyeok always seemed to drag them into stuff that never ended well, like the failed busking session at Hongdae or the gig they played at a club that ended up getting raided for drugs, or the time they performed at a high school and got laughed at. Like this competition that they still have to play because they already paid the joining fee and Sungjin had to survive a week on ramyun just to put his share in. Maybe it was just destiny that their band had failed. Maybe Junhyeok just brought failure to all his plans.

And yet Brian had never felt happier than when he was playing on the bass, Junhyeok’s keyboard tinkling in the background, Sungjin’s vocals echoing around them, Jae rocking it out on the guitar solos, Wonpil adding the little synth-y touch that just brought everything together. Brian had never loved Junhyeok more than when he scored them gigs, when he gave them some sort of hope. When he convinced Brian that he was more in love with music than his degree.

It was Junhyeok’s fault the band existed. It was Junhyeok’s fault the band broke up. Junhyeok was the reason they failed. Junhyeok was the only reason they had some sort of success. Brian’s thoughts keep tumbling round in his head, spinning this way and that until he can no longer discern who the hero and the villain are anymore. He throws his head back into his pillow, thumping his fist into his mattress, then into the wall.

“Damn you Im Junhyeok,” he mutters as pain spears his knuckles. In the bed opposite him, Jae’s gentle snores indicate that he’s fast asleep. Brian wishes he had the ability to fall asleep no matter what the circumstances. He covers his eyes with his other arm, flexes the fingers of his left hand. Tells himself it’s the pain shooting through it as the first tears slip undetected into his pillowcase.

 

 

 

A week later Sungjin still hasn’t returned and Brian is certain that it’s all over. They’re done. They’ve lost two members and soon they’ll lose a third - him. Junhyeok was right, he was never serious about this in the first place. He’d only joined to alleviate the homesickness that hit him as soon as he stepped off the plane. He’d only joined to get to know Park Sungjin. To know what it actually felt like to be in a band.

He flips through his draft book as he sits cross legged in the middle of the floor, various manuscripts and scraps of paper strewn around him. He’d pulled them out of his folder in random bunches, thrown them around him when he realized that Sungjin probably wasn’t coming back. What was the point of all these songs? All these scraggly notes scrawled over printed black lines, all these crossed out lyrics. Everything was pointless.

He’s just about to rip a page out of his manuscript book when Jae opens the door without warning. Brian watches his eyes wander around the room, taking in the chaos before settling on him. Sees the page bent in his hand. Brian can tell by the way Jae’s face changes that he knows exactly what he’s about to do.

“Brian, don’t!” Jae yelps, throwing himself into the room. He skids on paper, sends them flying around him as he launches himself at Brian. Brian feels nose against cheekbone as he’s knocked backwards into the floor, Jae’s heavy angular body pressing him into the carpet.

“Get off me Jae,” he says into his roommate’s shoulder. “It’s done. We’re done. It’s over.”

Jae pushes himself off the floor, his head hovering above Brian’s. From this angle he looks even more like Chicken Little, and a wave of annoyance floods through Brian. He’d always hated that movie. “We are _not_ done,” Jae says adamantly, his hands on either side of Brian’s head. “I didn’t think you of all people would give up like this, damn it.”

Brian gives a dry laugh. His throat is parched and he can see the dust floating around the room. “You and I both know that we know absolutely nothing about each other,” he manages, looking at the crack in the corner of the ceiling, just off to the left of where Jae’s head is over his. “So let’s just stop pretending now that we’re even friends.”

“What?”Jae asks, looking confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“We’re done,” Brian repeats. “All of us. Whatever we were. We only became friends because of Junhyeok and now that he’s gone none of us have any reason to stick around each other anymore. You can go back to being alone and I can go back to pretending I have a shitload of friends and Wonpil can go back to being a normal 2nd-year and Sungjin… well Sungjin can stay in Busan if that’s what he wants. I don’t care anymore.” He doesn’t quite know what he’s saying anymore. He can feel his mouth moving and he can hear the words coming out but he doesn’t mean any of this, surely, surely some part of him did actually value Jae’s company and his inability to leave any of them alone. Surely some part of him did come to regard these boys as brothers.

“Did you really think Junhyeok was the only reason we all became friends?” Jae has never looked so mad.

“Get off me Jae,” Brian whispers.

“Even Junhyeok gave a shit about the rest of us.” If tone of voice could kill, Brian would’ve been six feet under the second Jae opened his mouth. “Maybe you’re even worse than him, if you’re gonna give up on us just because he did.”

“I said get off me!” Brian tries to shove him away, ends up throwing the manuscript book to one side. It glides through the air and hits the door as Jae catches Brian’s arms and pins them back on the floor. He’s surprisingly strong for someone as thin as him, and for a second Brian forgets how they came to be like this; him lying on his back on the carpet surrounded by paper, yelling at Park Jaehyung.

“No!” Jae yells back. “How could you give up on us so easily?!”

“You wanna know why?” Brian pants, struggling. “Because we are nothing without Junhyeok. You, me, Sungjin, Wonpil… we’ll never be as good without him. And I was a fool for even hoping for one second that I could make it with guys like you.”

He kicks Jae in the stomach, and while his roommate writhes on the floor he makes a run for the door. Jae catches him around the ankle and he falls heavily on a pile of paper, trying to kick away Jae’s agile hands (damn all the guitar playing, Brian thinks) and grab at the manuscript book at the same time because he needs to rip it up, he needs to forget that any of this ever existed, that every time the five of them got together it had felt something like coming home…

The door opens. Brian’s gaze travels up too-long black slacks falling over shiny dress shoes, a white shirt, loosened tie and black blazer to rest on Wonpil’s face. He sees Wonpil take in the battered book at his feet, Jae hanging on to his ankles, the paper strewn everywhere, his dishevelled hair. “Hyung?” Wonpil says tentatively, and it sounds like a sob. He bends and picks up the book, and Brian sees his hands shaking. “Hyung, what… what are you doing?”

Something in Brian breaks.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, still looking up at Wonpil. Jae’s hands slowly release his ankles. “Wonpil, I’m so sorry.” He gets to his feet, looks at the notebook in Wonpil’s hands - the product of the long hours he spent with Wonpil trying to get harmonies right, trying to fit five instruments into one 3-minute song. The book he was just about to tear up. He backs away slightly. “I… I don’t know…” His thought are spinning again, tumbling over and under themselves and spearing each other through the gut. He’s aware of Jae standing somewhere to his right, of Wonpil still looking at him. “I’m sorry,” he repeats like a part of a song that he’s stuck at and can’t seem to progress past. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ He buries his face in his hands, tries to compose himself.

And that’s when Wonpil puts his arms around him and hugs him so hard that Brian wonders if he’s trying to keep himself from breaking apart himself. He can feel the side of Wonpil’s face pressed against his and Wonpil’s bony hips digging into his own. He can feel Wonpil shaking, and he did not ask for this, he really didn’t. So he pulls Wonpil in harder and buries his face in his bony shoulder, trying to say everything he can’t in this one hug. Jae wordlessly wraps his arms around the both of them, his forehead pressed somewhere between where Wonpil’s head starts and Brian’s ends. They stay like that for some time, not saying anything until the chill begins to descend into the room.

Wonpil falls asleep on Brian’s bed that night, still dressed in the clothes he wore to what Brian can only imagine was a job interview. Brian sneaks into Sungjin and Junhyeok’s clean, empty room and surveys the remains of what could have been. He pulls a piece of crumpled manuscript paper out of his pocket and pours all of his grief and loneliness and regrets on to the page.

He falls asleep on what was once Junhyeok’s bed. If he dreams, he doesn’t remember.

 

 

 

The next day, just as the sun is setting, he comes back to the room to find Jae lying on his bed, back to the door. He recalls the morning rush where Jae woke up to find him gone and Wonpil half stumbled half sprinted into Sungjin’s room to look for him and thought he was Junhyeok. The things he said to Jae the night before have been on his mind all day and he knows he won’t sleep easy tonight - who is he kidding, he hasn’t slept easy for the past 2 years anyway - unless he straightens things out.

Jae’s back is a lot bonier when his fingers press into it. This is probably the closest he has ever been to Jae, not counting the friendly and overly rough times Jae throws his arm around his shoulders, or the day before when Jae put his arms around both him and Wonpil and tried to pretend that his glasses weren’t wet because of tears.

He doesn’t apologise. He doesn’t want to give Jae a chance to forgive him, because Jae was right. He is just as bad as Junhyeok, maybe even worse. So quick to throw away good memories and maybe the best times of his life just because he can’t wrap his head around the fact that once again, he’s been abandoned.

And maybe Jae doesn’t forgive him. But when Brian wakes up the next morning in a bed that is once again not his own, sunlight streaming through the window, Jae is still there.

 

 

 

Not two days after this, Jae introduces him to Dowoon.

 

 

 

 

 

**Wonpil**

Junhyeok punched Wonpil once, square in the arm when he was about twelve, because Wonpil called his self-composed song in the vein of Mozart “bad.” Back then, Junhyeok had noodle-thin arms and hands with long fingers that skated over piano keys like bugs with hair-like legs on the surface of the mossy fountain at the park near where Wonpil lived. Basically saying that Junhyeok’s punch didn’t feel much like anything at all, and Wonpil had only flinched in surprise at the contact before exploding into a firecracker of laughter to Junhyeok’s _this is serious, Wonpil!_ even when a smile was twitching at the edges of his lips, too.

Ten years later, Junhyeok punches Wonpil again. Junhyeok still has noodle-thin arms and hands with long fingers that skate over piano keys but this time, Wonpil doesn’t laugh. Instead, he stays in bed all day, only getting up to contemplate going to class but ending up not, nursing the blackening bruise he feels in his gut as he’s curled up between the sheets that haven’t been washed in months.

“Are you okay?” Jinyoung asks him, shaking him out of the sleep he’d managed to slip off into. Wonpil blinks an ocean out of his eyes and still feels like he’s drowning, phone still in his hand from where he’d trapped his arm under his head, feeling numb and dislocated from the rest of his body.

Don’t say you didn’t see this coming. When the screen flashes, all Wonpil sees is Junhyeok’s text message. All of two words - some real sublime stuff - and the small little icons at the bottom of everyone who read it. He wonders what everyone else feels right now. Jae was probably pissed. Brian, disappointed. Sungjin a mix of the two - probably more disappointed than pissed, but also worried. Wonpil doesn’t know how he feels. Wonpil doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel.

He shifts under the covers. “I’m fine,” Wonpil says, Jinyoung risking a glance at him from where he was sitting on the floor. He probably doesn’t believe a word Wonpil was saying. “I think it’s just a cold,” he tries.

Jinyoung raises an eyebrow. “It’ll be fine tomorrow,” Wonpil insists, the words muffled into his pillow. It sounds a lot like trying to convince himself that it’ll be true. It sounds a lot like Junhyeok dropping out last minute with only a text and the notification from Sungjin’s message, telling them that every trace of Junhyeok is gone from their room.

He grazes his fingers over his stomach, where there’s no physical damage, but hurts all the same. This time, Junhyeok didn’t even touch him with his punch. But Wonpil feels like all the wind’s been knocked out of him anyway.

 

 

 

Wonpil had known Junhyeok for a long time before joining the band. They’d gone to the same piano academy when they were elementary schoolers, meeting backstage at Wonpil’s first summer recital when he’d accidentally spilled his fruit juice onto Junhyeok’s music sheets. Luckily that had been after Junhyeok’s performance, but he still cried over it and Wonpil’s parents forced him to apologize.

Even though they hadn’t ended up attending the same middle or high schools, they still hung out on odd weekends and sometimes in the sticky summers – when Junhyeok’s dad would drive him over to Wonpil’s house, twenty minutes away from his, and they’d waste the days away playing PlayStation or watching whatever cartoons were on television. Sometimes they’d talk, maybe in between starting a new game or channel surfing or when one of them got up to use to the bathroom, but if you asked Wonpil what they talked about, he wouldn’t quite remember. Those words were lost in the relative haze of the unbearable summer heat, carried away with the ever-trickier cadences of the pieces their piano teachers gave them.

What Wonpil does remember, though, is Junhyeok’s parents getting him a keyboard when he turned sixteen. That’s when Junhyeok told Wonpil he wanted to be in a band.

Wonpil was confused. “Why can’t you just be solo?” he had asked one day when they were playing basketball in the park. Junhyeok aimed for the hoop and missed. Frowning, he passed the ball to Wonpil, clammy from the dirt and the sweat of their hands.

“Have you ever seen a keyboardist go solo?” Junhyeok replied.

Wonpil considered as he dribbled the ball. “Paul McCartney plays the piano sometimes.”

Junhyeok snorted a little with laughter. He had a bad habit of that, in Wonpil’s opinion. “ _Sometimes_.” He reached over to steal the ball from Wonpil’s contented dribbling. “We play the piano all the time, Pil-ah.”

They ended up going to the same university, though by that time it’d been a good year and a half since Wonpil had last seen Junhyeok. It wasn’t like they weren’t friends anymore, at least to Wonpil. They still posted on each other’s Facebook walls for their birthdays with unflattering old pictures from piano recitals of the past – Junhyeok smiling with a mouth full of braces, Wonpil’s hair going in all directions – and Wonpil occasionally messaged Junhyeok for tips about university. It was more like the gravity of real life and responsibility drove them apart from each other, and it wasn’t until Wonpil’s mother suggested he have dinner with Junhyeok sometime that he remembered they used to spend lazy summer days together.

 

 

 

Wonpil guesses it’s his synth that brings them back together.

It’d been sitting in the corner of his dorm room that he shared with this guy named Jinyoung, his roommate who he’d clicked with instantly after they’d started messaging after room assignments had come out, collecting dust and purposeless. Wonpil hadn’t brought it with him because he expected Junhyeok to message him one day, asking if he’d like to join the band he was in. No, Wonpil had simply brought it because his parents hated it, and he was afraid he’d come back home when the year was over to find that they threw it away not long after he moved out.

It was a pretty black and white situation. Wonpil’s parents approved of him practicing Bach and Handel on their secondhand piano in the living room, with the occasional popular radio song thrown in between. Wonpil’s parents didn’t approve of him spending a good chunk of his fifteen-years-collected birthday money on a synthesizer. In pretty much the only rebellious act of all his adolescence, Wonpil bought it anyway, and his mother stared at it like she stared at their kitchen trash can when it was overflowing.

Only Junhyeok approved of his purchase, coming over to Wonpil’s not long after he had bought it, whistling in admiration. “This is super cool,” sixteen-year-old Junhyeok had said, and it made Wonpil feel very accomplished.

Apparently, twenty-year-old Junhyeok still thought synths were “super cool,” because Wonpil found himself, two weeks into his first semester, standing at the door of a dingy-looking basement with Junhyeok and three other guys tuning their instruments intimidatingly.

“Oh,” the guy with the bass looks up first, shaking his hair out of his face. “Who’s that?”

“The synth player I was telling you about,” Junhyeok says as he plugs in his keyboard, battling to untangle the cords from someone else’s. The guy whose cords are tangled with his, tall and wearing a pair of enormous glasses, says _hey, hey, hey!_ as Junhyeok tosses the freed end vaguely toward him. “Is it cool if he sits on practice to see what we do?”

The third guy, who’s sitting on the stool in the center, already prepped with his acoustic guitar plugged in, turns around and waves Wonpil in. He has a big nose and an amicable smile, and Wonpil tries not to step on any of the wires snaking across the ground. “Yeah, no problem,” he says, friendly enough, but Wonpil gets the sense that he’s actually the one in charge around here.

It’s not so much a “sit in and listen to us and see if you want to join” kind of thing than a “you are already a part of this band and finding where you can add in some synths take this arrangement to the next level.” When they stare at Wonpil expectantly after playing two pieces, he only claps in the awkward silence.

Glasses guy sighs first. “You said this guy plays a synth, Junhyeok?” he says, slipping out from under the strap of his guitar and putting it back in its makeshift shoe rack stand. “Does he even own a synth?”

Wonpil blinks, still sitting on his hands. Big nose cuts in before Glasses guy can continue. “What he means is, the first rule of this band is that you have to have your own instrument,” he starts. “We’re all broke so we can’t really go around buying you a synth, even if you can play one –”

Wonpil blinks again. Several times. “Wait,” he says, once he’s sure Big nose has trailed off. “Does this mean I’m in your band?”

The bass player furrows his eyebrows in confusion before turning to look at Junhyeok. Glasses guy looks at Junhyeok. Big nose looks at Junhyeok. Junhyeok looks at his keyboard.

“You didn’t know?” Big nose asks with a laugh. It eases the atmosphere a little, until Wonpil, not knowing any better, replies with a very sincere and firm _nope_.

They’re silent for a bit. “Well, this is awkward,” Glasses guy notes.

And that’s how Wonpil joined the band.

 

 

 

After a few terse exchanges over their new group chat for the band and several days of Jinyoung giving him questioning glances, asking if he’s alright, they decide to cancel band practice for the week. It’s a pretty level-headed decision: midterms are coming up, and someone is probably going to pull an all-nighter (usually Brian, who barely sleeps), even considering the wringer Junhyeok had just put them through. Wonpil spends his time not at practice napping on Jinyoung’s bed instead, convinced that his own would only pull him further into whatever funk he’d had on that first day, staring at Junhyeok’s text until his vision went blurry.

Life goes on, he rationalizes. He goes to all his classes, reads all his parents’ worried texts asking about finding internships and responds accordingly, eats meals with Jinyoung and Jackson. Lets his mind off the band for once. Instead of anger, or whatever that first stage of grief is, all Wonpil feels is a numb acceptance of everything that makes it unnervingly easy to pull through his routines.

Junhyeok leaving makes sense, like a logical conclusion of something that hadn’t explicitly building and erupting over, but happened to occur anyway. Maybe it didn’t make sense to Jae, whose usual weird jokes in the group chat turned into passive aggressive mentions of Junhyeok, or even Sungjin, who told them “I don’t get why this happened.” Otherwise, the group chat was silent and tense. That first day, Wonpil types “I think I get why” eleven times and deletes it ten. The text still hangs on the chat bar whenever he unlocks his phone but Wonpil thinks it’s better to keep it to himself.

Junhyeok wanted something more than the rest of them could give him. Wonpil thinks of all the late nights he watched him pull, going back to his dorm while Junhyeok remained sitting at his keyboard, mapping out notes and chords until he dreamed music, and all the times Junhyeok looked at Wonpil with a frown, asking _don’t you want this to be more than just a college thing?_ It wasn’t anyone’s individual fault, and no matter how much they all tried to map out their shortcomings with Junhyeok, it was just that Junhyeok knew what he wanted, knew that Wonpil, Jae, Sungjin, and Brian couldn’t give it to him, and then he left.

Not that it didn’t hurt. Wonpil feels abandoned for the first couple days - after all the time they’d known each other, Junhyeok hadn’t even given him so much of a warning before completely disappearing out of his life. Everything had happened so quickly that Wonpil wonders if he imagined how close he’d been with Junhyeok - the days of discussing their deepest fears for the future - and how they’d gradually drifted apart - Junhyeok making some snide comment about when Wonpil had asked to move practice an hour later due to his midterm - or that they’d even been friends in the first place. All that comes with the suddenness of Junhyeok’s departure is an alarming sense of distance, and the thought in the back of his mind that Wonpil just wasn’t good enough for him, for any of them.

 

 

 

“Are you sure you wanna keep working on this?”

Brian looks over at him with a neutral expression on his face, Sungjin’s guitar in between his lap and arms, held captive to witness their awkwardness. Not that they were usually awkward, especially on good days. But this was the farthest from a good day. This was, safe to say, probably the worst day - objectively and subjectively - for them to be working on a new arrangement, ever.

They had set the date a few weeks ago, before Junhyeok had dropped the bomb that he was leaving, because it’d been one of the few times their blocks of free time had coincided. And Brian, who was surprisingly firm on keeping his appointments, no matter how pointless, insisted that they still meet up despite the fact that their keyboardist was gone. Wonpil just had nothing better to do and could never keep his lies straight even if he wanted to tell one to get out of the meeting.

“What do you mean?” Brian asks, shoulders tense. Wonpil had never seen Brian so unrelaxed before. “We’re almost done,” he says, flipping through the pages of their old draft, as if it would prove his point. They’d only gone through two so far.

If Brian, who Wonpil had regarded as the most easygoing between the five, no, _four_ of them, was this hung up on Junhyeok’s departure, he wondered how Jae and Sungjin were coping. “Do you want to talk about it?” he suggests, looping an arm through one of Brian’s. Brian doesn’t push him away or yell out exasperated _why, Wonpil, whyyyy’s_ like Jae does or give Wonpil the occasional lengthy talk on how Busan men don’t engage in the complicated territory known as “feelings” like Sungjin will - though Sungjin usually initiates most of the hugs between them - so Wonpil guesses things aren’t as bad as they could be.

Brian lets him cuddle into his side as he taps a pencil against the loose leaf music sheets, the sharp sound cutting the relative silence between them into even rhythmic chunks. “No,” Brian replies after a long period of consideration. He pointedly looks back at the music sheets. Wonpil follows his gaze and stares until the notes are burned into his vision.

“I mean,” Brian starts again after Wonpil’s scribbling in ideas into the margins. “God,” he sighs, reaching to run a hand through his hair. He drops some of the papers and they scatter onto the floor. “I don’t even know what to say.”

Wonpil thinks about that and all the ambivalence swirling inside him. “Yeah,” he says, trying to search for the words to describe it all. They slip through his fingers like the music sheets Brian dropped on the floor. “Me too.”

 

 

 

Even as the youngest between them, Wonpil feels like he has it fairly easy. Sungjin is the one who calls most of the shots, Jae and Brian add in their feedback, Junhyeok used to sit in the corner with his keyboard like a recluse if his suggestions were shot down, and Wonpil. Wonpil usually just went and hugged whoever would let him while they seriously discussed logistics.

It’s Sungjin who texts him beforehand. Something along the lines of, _hey, i’m going to suggest you take over keyboard at next practice, is that alright with you?_ Sungjin is nice and dependable like that, unlike, as Jae would offhandedly mention out of the corner of his mouth, Junhyeok, who they thought had been dependable enough.

Wonpil is flattered that they trust him enough for that. It was a pretty logical conclusion, considering Wonpil and Junhyeok did meet at a piano academy all those years ago. But it was also a gamble - Wonpil hadn’t touched the keyboard in months, and even when he did, his fingers didn’t glide across the keys like Junhyeok’s. And what if Wonpil decided to just leave out of the blue a few days later?

Not like he would. But that showed how much trust they placed in him - to stay, to be as good as Junhyeok, to come to practice. Wonpil wishes he believed in himself as much as they believed in him, that he was as passionate about the band to pull all-nighters writing music instead of studying for his next exam, that he was good enough at anything to make Junhyeok stay and his parents proud of him.

 _Okay,_ Wonpil texts back, feeling lukewarm and suddenly very, very tired.

 

 

 

Jae shrugs him off next practice, when Wonpil’s starting to snuggle into his side on the couch. “Wonpil, no,” he says, deadpan look on his face as Wonpil just blinks owlishly in response. They have an unspoken staring contest until Jae looks away first with a scowl. “Can’t you see I”m busy right now?”

Wonpil presses a child-like kiss against Jae’s cheek - to Jae’s disdain and loud, half-joking _yuck_ \- before bouncing away to find another target. Brian watches everything, amused through the default pissed expression that’s settled on his face since Wonpil saw him last. Wonpil’s pretty sure Jae loves him, somewhere deep down in his heart. He’s just pretty sure that Jae loves Brian more.

Wonpil got nervous when he wasn’t doing anything. He rests his chin against Sungjin’s shoulder, to which the older boy tries to swat him away before turning back to tuning his guitar. Hence, why he liked reaching for people’s hands and wrapping his arms around their shoulders, why his palms were always held out first for that unsolicited high-five, and why he tended to bounce his leg when sitting down. Wonpil settles back onto his shoulder anyway, and Sungjin, defeated, lets him without any protest.

Today, the nagging sense of unproductivity chews at Wonpil a little more so than usual - an hour before, he’d been fending off his mother’s worries about _have you been looking for a job yet, think about summer, think about your future_ \- and it sets his anxious cadence a little faster than usual. If any of them notice how Wonpil is flitting between back-hugging Brian, prodding Jae’s long legs with his toes, and clacking his teeth with his chin on Sungjin’s shoulder quicker than normal, they don’t say anything.

The thing is he hasn’t been looking for a job, or thinking about summer other than its sky-rocketing temperatures, and Wonpil’s future continued to look like an enormous, blurry blob of all the possible outcomes of his life. Instead, he’s been thinking about not thinking about Junhyeok. Wonpil bounces his leg so quickly that it looks like the blur of hummingbird wings in his glassy-eyed vision.

If there had to be a time when this feeling, the insistent need to do _something_  stemmed from, maybe Wonpil would trace it back to his parents and their constant, well-meaning nagging. Maybe to that time in junior high, when some third year had told him he ate too slow during Wonpil’s first lunch at the new cafeteria. Or maybe even to when Wonpil was seven and playing piano. He’d always been the one praised by his teacher, and then his mother requested that Wonpil be placed in the other class, the teacher notoriously known for yelling at primary schoolers. Wonpil had received no more praises after that.

And maybe that’s why Wonpil feels half-asleep, like a leg that he’d been sitting on for too long, the circulation cut off, as he stands behind the keyboard - Junhyeok’s back-up one, the only thing he’d left behind - and plays. He hasn’t practiced anything on his own, looking for research positions and internships instead, and it shows when Wonpil hears himself press the wrong chords too many times to be forgiven.

“Hey,” he says, walking up to Sungjin after Jae and Brian have left to go get something quick to eat. Sungjin looks up from where he’s packing his guitar back in its case, all loving and careful hands. Wonpil thinks about the way he gently shoved Junhyeok’s abandoned keyboard back into the closet, quite carelessly. “Sorry about today.”

Sungjin furrows his eyebrows. “What do you mean?” he asks, sounding genuinely confused. Wonpil follows as Sungjin opens the closet where Jae and Brian put their instruments and amps, and leans his guitar against the wall.

Now Wonpil’s confused. “I messed up a lot,” he elaborates. “I’ll get it down next time, don’t worry.”

Sungjin smiles and shakes his head. A firm hand clasps Wonpil’s shoulder. “What are you saying, Wonpil-ah?” he laughs, as if Wonpil just delivered a punch line of a joke he himself doesn’t get. “You’re great, as usual.”

Wonpil smiles small. The nervous energy swirls inside him ominously.

 

 

 

A few days later, Sungjin goes back home, to Busan. He texts them all individually about it and normally Wonpil would trust Sungjin to come back, but after Junhyeok’s departure, Wonpil’s not so sure anymore. When Jinyoung asks him about band practice, Wonpil says _cancelled_ as nonchalantly as he can manage, and Jinyoung points out how not playing an instrument seems to be taking a toll on Wonpil’s psyche. Wonpil tells him to shut it, even though Jinyoung always ends up being right.

The band was supposed to be just a college thing. For fun and for stress-relief, and the occasional stressor, especially when Junhyeok would burst into their practice space, out of breath and using the remainder of it telling them about possible gigs and competitions. Some of the songs Wonpil wrote were complete jokes - one of the ones he and Brian had penned only contained the lyrics _fuck it all_ with a smashing guitar solo from Jae - and others were emotional outlets. Others were catchy pop band tunes that Wonpil would hum for days until even Jinyoung knew them inside out.

The problem was it never felt like “just a college thing.” All the late nights practicing, eating take-out dinners on the dusty floor, someone (probably Junhyeok) suggesting that they actually make a career out of this and actually get paid for playing in clubs, until another person (Sungjin) brings up how Wonpil’s not old enough to get into them. Laughing at something someone said at three AM, everyone half-delirious. Laughing because being with everyone made Wonpil happy and simultaneously terrified because he’d doodle their sheet music in the margins during lectures on corporate tax returns.

If Wonpil was better at it, maybe he’d consider being a musician. But that was a far away dream he’d always been too afraid to pursue, after years of being around people who strived for nine-to-five jobs. The problem was that no matter how outlandish the dream felt, Wonpil could never quite let go of it, and now he was stuck with the task of running through the tiny tunnel of reality with a kite made of his dreams still in his hands.

But now that Sungjin, Sungjin who had always been silently in charge, the one to clasp Wonpil’s shoulder and tell him earnestly _you did well_ , is gone, Wonpil feels the kite being ripped out of his hands. Instead of feeling relieved that the choice was made for him, all Wonpil gets is the empty sense of unfulfillment, the _what-if_ he’ll come back to twenty years from now when he chances upon seeing a band perform at a bar after work.

They all understand that it’s pretty much over. Wonpil thinks about asking to make certain, to get some kind of closure from it all. But then he thinks about Junhyeok’s two-word text.

He lets the kite fall to the ground.

 

 

 

“So what are you passionate about?”

Wonpil’s been through this question before, with his father on the odd holiday Wonpil went home and practiced getting interviewed. His father had handed back the cue cards with an untelling press of his lips and a _sound more enthusiastic_.

The problem is, Wonpil’s not enthusiastic. He’d gotten this interview through one of Jackson’s friends - an international student named Mark - who’d gotten his friend’s uncle to pull some strings for Wonpil. And though Wonpil wants to be ecstatic for the opportunity, he isn’t. He bounces his leg from where he’s sitting on the far left, hoping that he can repurpose some of the other interviewee’s answers for his own.

The first girl is good at speaking. Persuasive, engaging, genuine-sounding. Her dress pants are tailored very nicely to her ankles. Wonpil looks down at his that hang a little too far down so they hit the heels of his shoes. Everything she says goes in one ear and out the other while Wonpil considers how seriously interviewers take their wardrobe into consideration.

The guy sitting next to him is completely serious. He has the kind of voice that drones on monotonously, but Wonpil guesses he couldn’t control that. There were a lot of things people couldn’t control. Wonpil couldn’t control Junhyeok leaving the band, Sungjin going to Busan, Brian and Jae not contacting him about anything the whole time. Wonpil couldn’t control the way his fingers felt foreign on Junhyeok’s old keyboard like they didn’t belong, the way his parents would call him in the middle of practice and tell him to find an extracurricular that could _do something for your future_ , the way he knew they meant well. Couldn’t control how he fell asleep in lectures about finance and dreamt of new arrangements and melodies and the five of them standing on a stage flooded with spotlights, smiling at each other as they played their set.

“Kim Wonpil.”

Wonpil looks up. His leg isn’t bouncing anymore. Instead of the answer they’d want to hear on his lips, all Wonpil can think about is the first time he harmonized with Sungjin and the giddy smile he’d felt on his face. Jae asking to touch his synth one time and nodding after the experience, a wholly impressed _awesome_ making Wonpil feel like floating. Writing songs with Brian and laughing at some stupid idea one of them had proposed in their writer’s block. Junhyeok and that first time he’d led Wonpil into the practice room saying, “These guys are great, and you’re good at synth, we’re going to be the best band ever.”

Wonpil wipes a sweaty palm against his slacks. Well-ironed and corporate. He absentmindedly thinks about how he hates the way they fit and that’s when he realizes. This isn’t what he wants.

What he really wants is the band, _his_ band, fallen apart or not, and pressing the keys on Junhyeok’s left-behind keyboard until two in the morning or whenever they called it quits. Junhyeok may have quit. But Wonpil, Wonpil’s going to do his goddamn best to hold out until the end.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Seven pairs of eyes look at him, confused. “I don’t think I have the right passion for this job.” He stands abruptly, chair scraping behind him. “Thank you for your time,” Wonpil adds, bowing, before walking towards the door and letting it close behind him.

 

 

 

He runs all the way back to Brian and Jae’s room. By the time Wonpil’s nearing the door, he can feel the sweat on the back of his dress shirt and the slacks sticking to his skin. It’s only when he reaches for the handle that he realizes his vision is blurry and that tears are stinging his eyes.

He flings open the door. Jae’s got his hand around Brian’s ankle. Brian’s arm is out, blindly reaching for the book of songs they’d written, which just happens to be at Wonpil’s feet.

Everything literally stops in that moment. They’re fighting, registers in Wonpil’s mind. Why are they fighting?

It’s too late, some other part of him says. They all hate each other now. You all hate each other. Turn back, turn back, turn back.

But then there’s the songs, the cover bent out of shape and the pages no better, some of the loose leaf papers strewn all over the floor. Wonpil picks up the book, cradling it in his arms. “Hyung?” he says, and it sounds watery and shaky. “Hyung, what are you doing?”

Brian seems to snap out of some kind of stupor. He’s shaking and Wonpil’s shaking and Jae looks defeated as apologies spill from Brian’s lips. All Wonpil wants is for Sungjin to come back and for them to be alright again and not fight and to try to put themselves back together even after Junhyeok so he gathers Brian into a hug and thinks _please, please, please_ over and over again.

After a minute, Wonpil feels Jae’s glasses press against the side of his forehead and his long arms draped around him and Brian. Brian is still saying sorry and Wonpil’s still crying, but in that moment, it doesn’t matter that Junhyeok quit, that Wonpil can’t play the keyboard as well as he wants to, that Sungjin can’t join in with their hug right now.

All that matters is the press of their limbs together. Their shaky breaths, the only things puncturing the silence. They’re trying to piece everything back together, and that’s really all Wonpil can ask for.

 

 

 

Wonpil wakes up at three in the morning in Brian’s bed with an overwhelming sense of incompleteness.

He finds Sungjin on his phone. Sends him a text message and hopes it can convey everything from Seoul to Busan.

There. Feeling full and still groggy, Wonpil twists himself further into Brian’s covers and lets his eyes close, dreaming that Sungjin comes back.

 

 

 

 

 

**Jae**

In the grand scheme of all things, Jae is well aware that a band is just a band, and that they’re all tiny little specs of dust floating in an infinitely gargantuan universe, and their little spats and problems weigh approximately zero on the giant scale of all time—but, well, Jae has a few of his own particularities (“A _few_?” Brian would definitely interject here) and one of those is that he really, really hates when people leave him.

Cue Im “I’m quitting” Junhyeok.

In the sixth grade, Jae was forced to suffer through something called C.A.R.E: Connections Are Required [for] Everyone. It was the ill-conceived and clumsily acronym-ed after school program of rich white Southern Californian moms stymied by their spoiled children’s fragile egos and proclivity to smoke weed with eighth graders behind the 7-11 after school, and Jae got stuck in it because his mom couldn’t pick him up until 4:15 that year, and—anyway, it was a load of bull crap, partly because it was team-taught by one of the said WASP moms and the math teacher who she may or may not have been sleeping with, something Jae only recognizes in retrospect—

But, the point is, Jae remembers one thing from C.A.R.E. and it tends to boomerang into his consciousness at inopportune moments, like when Junhyeok so eloquently messages the group _I’m quitting_.

The first thing Jae thinks is, _sometimes people want to let go because they’re scared of the work it will take to stay_.

When Jae gets back to the room he repeats this to Brian, who doesn’t even move an inch to turn over and look at Jae from where he’s lying on his bed, looking at the blank wall.

“And you think that’s true?” he asks.

“It’s called empathy,” Jae says to Brian’s back.

“It’s called living in denial.”

“Ain’t that just a river in Egypt?” Jae quips. But Brian’s already put his earbuds back in his ears.

 

 

 

C.A.R.E. emphasized building families—ironic, given that its founders could barely hold their own together—and with that quote itching under his skin in the days after Junhyeok announces his resignation, Jae starts thinking about that. Building families. Because they’d been something like one once.

“Have you ever,” Brian had asked when they first met, eyeing his guitar in the corner of the dorm room, “Been in a band?”

Jae, nineteen years old and deeply in need of friends in this country that was supposedly his homeland except for how he felt like he’d walked through the looking glass 95.3% of the time, blinked up at him and shrugged.

“Tried once. But it was hard, you know? I’m thinking that now maybe I should go for the singer-songwriter schtick. I’m no Adam Levine but I could maybe pitch an Ed Sheeran thing?”

Brian’s eyes peeled away from the guitar and settled on Jae. He was tall, but held himself easily, hands in the front pockets of his ripped light-wash jeans. “You know, I’ve always wanted to be in a band.”

And possibly because Jae is an idiot, but more likely because he was brainwashed by C.A.R.E., Jae followed that idiot right into The Band, which was as close to The One as Jae has ever been, lack of romantic entanglement notwithstanding.

One summer a year or two ago, they’d all been sitting around writing songs until Junhyeok came back one day and announced he’d found them “a gig,” which turned out to be playing songs to kids at the local library. Junhyeok was always finding the next “gig,” and all things considered, the library was one of his better finds. And the five of them had traipsed down there, where they discovered that kids might love music but unsupervised children worship at the altar of chaos, and Sungjin had continued diligently playing while one kid gave him a faux-hawk with a bottle of paste—

“Oh, he’s still going,” Junhyeok had observed, mild and slightly amused.

“Should we help?” Wonpil asked from their perch atop a row of bookcases that were slightly taller than the five-year-old demons.

“Are you kidding?” Jae’s eyes bugged out of his head. “Sungjin’s got this under control.”

“I think I love him,” Brian joked. Sungjin went on playing. He looked good in a pasty faux-hawk.

And it’s memories like these that makes Jae think Junhyeok _can’t_ leave, because the way he remembers it, it was in these moments that Jae actually felt for-real, no-take-backs happy. When they’d stand around their basement practice room on those hot summer nights, mosquitoes floating in gently through the tiny open windows at the top of the walls, Jae almost felt like he was home. Almost felt like he belonged to something—really belonged, like he was wanted, and all that, even if half the time he wasn’t not sure what the rest of them were thinking. Even if half the time he didn’t know how to phrase his thoughts. Guitar in his hand, singing into the secondhand microphone Wonpil scrounged up god knows where—Jae wished he could stay like that forever.

And if he felt it, didn’t Junhyeok?

 

 

 

Jae has a couple of theories about why Junhyeok left the band. They’d had an argument a few days before he quit—that is, Junhyeok had asked “can you really rhyme kiss with missed?” and Jae and Brian couldn’t help but pick that question up, being the only ones who had actually attended full-time school in English. ( _Slant rhyme_ , Jae had pointed out, and Brian countered that this wasn’t Emily Dickinson and was it actually a slant rhyme if it had an extra syllable? And so on, without coming to any resolution before they got too hungry and gave the argument up in favor of dinner.) If he thinks back on it, Junhyeok’s eyebrows were furrowed together in frustration, and he kept rubbing his fingers into his eyes before turning to his cellphone with a heavy sigh. As this theory goes, Junhyeok became so frustrated with the superfluous disagreements that constantly plagued the band’s songwriting, he eventually decided enough was enough, and went to find his place with people who were actually serious about music. Which in Jae’s mind is code for “pretentious,” so, whatever. Sungjin likes this theory the best, and Wonpil has accepted it with some addendums. Jae holds to it, if he’s asked.

But his other theory has to do with Junhyeok, and Brian, and Jae himself, and a lot of things he doesn’t know how to put into words—like that time he and Junhyeok penned a song together and when they played it for the band, Brian didn’t talk to him for two days, or how the night after the argument that supposedly pissed off Junhyeok’s delicate artistic sensibilities he and Jae had walked home in a light rain, not really talking about anything, but at the end Junhyeok had said something like, _do you really think this is all we have to look forward to?_ And Jae didn’t know what he meant then, and he still doesn’t, but he wishes he could remember that conversation for real, so he could mine it for clues about why on earth Junhyeok couldn’t even stick around for the competition he’d forced them to enter.

 

 

 

Brian takes Junhyeok’s departure hard.

Well—they all take it hard, but Jae lives with Brian, and Brian isn’t talking to him, and the waves of Antarctic-temperature air that waft towards Jae every time he tries to start the most neutral of conversations affect him at _least_ as much as Junhyeok actually leaving. He texts the group absently, cracking old inside jokes to try to lighten the mood. At some point Brian comes into the room, holds up his phone, and says “You know Junhyeok was the one who said that, right?” After that, Jae stops trying.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Jae says to Jimin as they walk back from class one day, with her stack of freshman-level books balanced on his shoulder. “We’re a band, you know? But it’s like it doesn’t matter.”

“Will you keep being a band?” Jimin asks, peering up at him.

Jae considers that for a moment, letting it roll around in his head.

“I don’t know,” he finally says. The words taste bitter.

 

 

 

Sungjin asks him to help clean up the practice room a few days after Junhyeok abandons them. Jae goes because he knows Wonpil is busy and Brian is moody, even if he knows he’ll spend the whole time on cockroach watch and _seriously_ , Junhyeok could have at least cleaned up his stash of half-eaten oreos before he called it quits.

Sungjin doesn’t talk much while they’re there. Jae starts thinking about him, and about all of them. He knows Sungjin feels like a failure, because Sungjin has an unhealthy inclination to take responsibility for things he can’t actually change. The way Jae sees it, there really wasn’t anything Sungjin could do—it’s funny, the band wasn’t his idea but it’s more his band than anyone else’s, in some ways.

“Do you still want to do the competition?” Jae asks, his voice floating lightly like dust in the air.

Sungjin makes a noncommittal noise in his throat. Jae goes back to cleaning.

In Jae’s opinion, they should do the competition. Sungjin needs the win. So do the rest of them. Jae needs it—he needs it to prove something, especially to himself. Maybe to prove that this whole band endeavor wasn’t a waste of time when he could have been filling out ten times as many job applications and interviewing for that foreign service officer job he was supposedly on track for. But he didn’t do those things, because he was here. Maybe he needs to go to the competition to prove this whole band wasn’t a waste of his heart.

“Junhyeok needs a good scolding,” Jae says absently.

“Scolding?” Sungjin asks, and Jae realizes he’s spoken in English. Stuffy English, at that. He goes back to cleaning without bothering to clarify.

It’s true though, and it’s a little weird that Sungjin isn’t going to be the one to do it. Jae wonders if he’s the only one who actually gives a shit about what caused Junhyeok to leave.

In that moment he makes up his mind. He’ll go get Junhyeok, and if he can’t bring him back, then he’ll leave him there. But at least he’ll know why.

The next day, Sungjin buys a ticket for Busan.

Jae sighs, and starts trying to track down Junhyeok via his Instagram posts.

 

 

 

It’s not hard to figure out where Junhyeok is, because the man is a narcissist with an unhealthy love of trendy, commercialized cafes that look local but are actually corporate impostors. (Jae and Brian had a late night procrastinating on papers and researching stupid stuff, a month ago, when everything was still okay, and somehow it turned into protesting The Man, which is not the bad guy in this story, but Jae think it’s relevant, anyway. If Junhyeok appreciated genuinely local, unpolished cafes, maybe he would have appreciated his genuinely local, unpolished band. Or something.)

He’s on his way back to the room for the money he needs for a bus fare when he stumbles upon Brian trying to destroy his _music._

“Brian, don’t!” Jae yells. He throws himself in Brian’s way. They scuffle. Brian is objectively stronger, but Jae’s got the strength of willpower this time, and he holds Brian down until the music is safe.

“Get off me, Jae,” Brian says bitterly, his voice muffled by Jae’s shoulder. “It’s done, we’re done, it’s over.”

Jae leans back to get a good look at Brian, but doesn’t let go. Whatever Brian’s thinking right now eludes him—and it’s not like Brian’s that hard to figure out, but there’s this undercurrent of something Jae doesn’t understand, and probably never will. “We are not done,” Jae tells him, determined to get something through his thick skull. “I didn’t think you of all people would give up like this, damn it.”

Everything that comes out of Brian’s mouth next stings, and festers. Jae attends to it in small patches, “We only became friends because of Junhyeok” and “You can go back to being alone” and “I don’t care anymore” floating to the surface like ugly debris. Somewhere in the back of his mind Jae registers that Brian’s carefree nature must have only meant that a volcano lay dormant under the surface, but he’s not really in the mood for analysis now.

“Even Junhyeok gave a shit about the rest of us,” Jae spits out. “Maybe you’re even worse than him, if you’re gonna give up on us just because he did.”

After that Brian lunges for his notebook, but in the movement, the sheets of music shoot through the air and hit the door. Brian stops to watch it, transfixed, and Jae seizes the opportunity to grab him again. Here he is, trying to talk sense into the people who were always trying to talk sense into him.

“We’ll never be as good without him,” Brian says.

As if that’s the point.

Brian takes advantage of Jae’s shock to knee him hard in the stomach. Jae ignores the pain to swivel around and grab Brian by the ankle before he can get to his manuscript book, because he’s obviously completely _lost it_ and there’s nothing Jae can do except stop him and wait it out.

Then Wonpil shows up, and Brian starts crying.

Some part of Jae is intensely and painfully aware that when it came down to it, it was always someone else on the other end of Brian’s truthful emotions. That the steady, concerned presence he’d gotten used to was an obligation-driven Brian, and that this Brian, the one getting snot all over Wonpil’s pink sweater, is a stranger.

But in the end it doesn’t really matter. Jae puts his arms around both of them, and holds on.

 

 

 

By one in the morning, Brian is gone and Wonpil is asleep and Junhyeok is posting pictures of himself at a bar within a short subway ride. So Jae slips quietly out of the room, clutching a jacket in his left hand and empty air in his right.

The night slides around him, chill air and neon lights. The subways rattle audibly, every sound magnified in the empty space. Jae sits in a smooth plastic seat and watches the dark view of the tunnels and then the sudden appearance of the city as they emerge above ground. Maybe he does belong here, he thinks in a distant sort of way. Maybe life is like this, a collection of moments that don’t quite fit together. Spend too much time looking for the pattern between them and you’ll miss out on the content of each one.

He locates the bar, and then Junhyeok. He isn’t hard to find—he’s the only one smartly dressed and fairly sober, sitting in one corner, watching a crooning guitarist mumble into the lone microphone on the bar’s tiny stage.

Jae sits down next to him without a word. If Junhyeok notices him, he gives no indication. His eyes never waver from the singer. He doesn’t look enraptured, but more like he’s studying the guy, waiting for the meaning to emerge the same way one reads a particularly difficult academic text. His eyes glaze over occasionally, and then he focuses again, until finally the song is over and the guitarist gets off stage to a smattering of half-hearted applause.

“That’s what it is, right?” Junhyeok asks. “You’re this guy, or you’re a sell-out.”

Jae doesn’t say anything still. Junhyeok hasn’t really said anything yet—this is cliché, old hat conversation, small talk for local bands.

“Maybe I’ll just go be a K-pop star,” Junhyeok laughs, rubbing a palm across his face.

“You could.” Jae considers Junhyeok’s dark eyes and frown. “It would make more sense to do that than what you’re doing right now.”

Junhyeok sighs and finally meets his eyes. “I’m not doing anything right now.”

Jae’s eyebrows lift above his glasses.

“You owe us better than that, you know.”

Junhyeok turns away again.

“I’m mad at you. The guys are upset. Brian’s a wreck.”

“Brian’s in love with the whole world,” Junhyeok says with a bitter laugh, “Of course he’s a wreck.”

“And you?” Jae asks carefully. “You’re just in love with yourself?”

Junhyeok rubs his eyes and sighs again. “It’s not like that, okay? It’s more like—I don’t know.”

“Try.”

Junhyeok stares at the empty mic stand for a few minutes more. Then, finally, he begins to speak.

“A few weeks ago I got offered a record contract,” he says, each word evenly measured, his eyes never meeting Jae’s. “After we played at Two Cats. Just me.”

He pauses as if to let Jae swallow this information. Jae waits without saying anything. He just feels numb, maybe a little empty, but not really emotional. Just—there.

“So I didn’t tell you guys,” Junhyeok continues. “I went to their offices to see what it was all about. I was really going to do it, you know? I wasn’t going to even finish school, just go straight into this big plan that they had for me. I don’t know what I was going to say to the rest of you.”

A silence spreads out between them.

“But?” Jae prompts.

“I was going to tell you, but then we all went busking—you remember that one night that we were down by the riverside? And everything was—”

“Perfect,” Jae supplies.

“Yeah. And I don’t know, I realized—that was what I really wanted. And that was why I was so unhappy. Because nothing was ever going to be perfect.”

Deep down, Jae doesn’t disagree. Nothing is ever going to be perfect. But he also thinks he knows what Junhyeok is getting at—the gnawing fear that you’ll run forever and end up nowhere, anyway.

“So then?”

“So then I realized I needed to make some changes.”

“And you just—ditched the rest of us, without an explanation?”

Junhyeok didn’t look at him. “I’m sorry.”

Jae realizes he’s done here. If it was that easy for Junhyeok to disconnect—well, there was no bringing him back unless he wanted to return.

“Me too,” Jae says.

 

 

 

Jae spends the day wandering the city, fueling himself with to-go cups of coffee. He stops outside a subway stop for a while, listening to a three-man band busking. The girl at the helm of the group has a stunning voice and Jae lets it wash over him. He feels like Junhyeok has infected him. Maybe dreams really are just that—something to hold in your head, but not in your reality. And maybe no one _does_ care, and maybe he is just doomed to drift aimlessly, without real connections, indefinitely.

Eventually, Jae wanders back to the dorm.

 

 

 

The slightest bit of setting sun slices through the curtains, drawing a long golden line across the tile floor. Jae holds onto his cell phone absently, intending to text Jimin or maybe Seunghoon or else just play Solitaire indefinitely, but instead he finds himself staring at that thin rectangle of sunlight. Somewhere in the back of his brain the tune to “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” starts up, and he thinks of all those VHS tapes he’d rewind one after another and how they’d given him this idea that every adventure would end up somewhere wonderful, happy endings and all that, but now he’s got some kind of yellow brick road shining before his eyes and he’s thinking _but follow it to where, Dorothy?_ because it doesn’t lead anywhere but the corner of his off-white wall.

The door creaks behind him, but Jae doesn’t move. He expects Brian to stand in the doorway for a moment, and then leave, off to dinner with Ayeon or Jackson or whoever it is this week. But instead, he listens to the shuffle of slippers across the floor, and then the bed dips down behind him.

For a moment, everything is quiet. Brian doesn’t say anything and Jae doesn’t move, preferring to keep his eyes on the sunlight stretching across his floor. But he can hear Brian breathing, every now and then taking a deeper breath like he’s getting ready to say something, but exhaling instead when he gives up.

“Are you mad at me?” Brian says finally.

Jae doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know _what_ to say. He wishes it were that simple—like back in elementary school when a friend would play kickball instead of wall ball at recess, and they’d be mad at each other all through lunch, but make up by the time they were getting their backpacks ready to go home. Back then, _mad_ had clear beginning and ending points; he doesn’t know what he feels now.

After a long time he feels Brian shift, and thinks that now he’ll leave. Then he feels the weight shift on the bed instead—Brian has laid down behind him, enough distance between the two of them that Jae can just feel his presence, but nothing more. Then there’s the pressure of fingertips on Jae’s back. Brian traces out the letters printed on the back of Jae’s t-shirt, threadbare and crackled copy announcing _Bad-Ass Badminton_ , the name of Jae’s intramural team. All those guys were back in the States already, and here Jae is still in Korea, watching a line of sunlight move across his floor.

“The band means a lot to me,” Brian says slowly. “You mean a lot to me. I was just angry. I’m sorry.”

Jae keeps quiet, partly because he has nothing to say, and partly because he wants to know what Brian has to say. It’s better if he waits, and listens. Sometimes Jae knows when to be quiet.

“It’s just like—” Brian sighs heavily, and his fingers still. “You know how you think things are going to turn out one way, and you’re going to finally be this person you thought you’d be? And things will work out and you’ll be—god, I don’t know—”

“Okay with yourself,” Jae supplies.

“Something like that.”

After that they are quiet. Jae wonders if Brian ever realized that the only reason Jae joined the band wasn’t because of Junhyeok. But it’s better not to ask.

Jae doesn’t remember drifting off to sleep. He just wakes up somewhere around one in the morning, starving. The sunlight on his floor has been replaced by the soft glow of of the city outside. He sits up, thinking he’s alone, but discovers Brian hasn’t moved at all. He lays there, one arm under his head and the other stretched out, fingers splayed exactly where they must have fallen from tracing the letters on Jae’s back. His mouth is curved into a small frown. Jae wraps his arms around his knees and sits there, watching him, wondering where the hell they’re supposed to go from here.

 

 

 

 

 

In spite of everything, Jae’s got a nasty habit of hope.

Which is why when he gets off the subway on his way to what is mostly likely their last band practice ever, he stops in front of a wide-eyed kid playing a box drum in rhythm with the rain pouring outside.

“Have you ever been in a band?” Jae asks the kid, who looks up at him and blinks several times. “Do you want to join mine?”

This is how Dowoon ends up in the basement practice room, sitting awkwardly atop his box drum, hair still damp from the rain, looking around at four boys arguing that they just can’t, just can’t possibly do that stupid competition that’s now only two weeks away.

“Why do you even want to?” Brian demands from Jae, who just shrugs.

“Now we’ve got him,” he says, pointing a thumb at Dowoon. “Doesn’t it seem like fate?”

“He didn’t even audition,” Sungjin points out—wearily, but without malice. “And he hasn’t said anything since he got here.”

“To be fair, that’s kind of how auditions into this band usually work,” Wonpil says.

Brian turns to Dowoon, a little bit of lightning in his eyes.

“And what about you?”

In unison, the other three turn to look at Dowoon. The wheels seem to click forward in his head. Objectively, it’s an easy decision—four boys with some kind of obvious conflict threatening to boil over, a keyboard and a synth awkwardly pushed into a V shape in one corner, a pointless competition only two weeks away with no time to really learn to play anything well.

But Dowoon looks at them and shrugs, a slight smile on his face.

“Why not?”

(And maybe—maybe—this is the secret of all good music: any meaningful human connection will necessarily include some kind of suffering. There is no love of any sort that doesn’t include pain; maybe it’s the pain that makes it love, and not something else.

But in the end you either leave, or you stick around and say,

“Why not?”)

 

 

 

 

 

When you’re young, there are things that are bound to happen. Not all of them are good, but not everything is bad. People will walk out of your life, but there will be new people coming in. You will not like some things that happen to you, will complain and question your fate, but you will realize things do happen for a reason. Maybe the day your favourite meal at the cafeteria runs out is the day you discover there’s another meal that you like even more.

So, boom. Junhyeok leaves the band.

Now what do you do?

You cry. You scream. You take it in. You get angry. You break things. You retreat into yourself, searching for an answer you’ll probably never find. Sometimes you leave. And sometimes you find someone who will pull you right back.

Sometimes, you find a Dowoon.

You’re not set yet, but that doesn’t mean that a bright future doesn’t await you. Bad things are bound to happen as well, not just good things, and that’s alright too. You stop running. You breathe. You walk back to the point where your life shattered and you gather the pieces. You pick yourself up. You walk. And you keep walking.

**Author's Note:**

> #teamlastminute, team "we only excel when we're running late"... we did it!!! finally! thank you guys for being such an amazing team, for all the hand-holding and collective screaming in frustration at writer's block ;;;; so proud of us for finishing this fic after all this time/crying! ♡♡♡
> 
> also, a HUGE thank you so much to the mods for being so accommodating as we were struggling to pull through ;___; you guys are the true mvps ♡♡♡


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